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Lost & Found: The Rabbits
May. 12th, 2011 13:27Tan, Shaun. Lost & Found. New York: Scholastic, 2011.
This was probably not the book to pick up to read when I was exhausted; any infelicities in the following are, even more than usual, entirely my fault, and as always, I welcome corrections and comments.
The Rabbits (1998). Words by John Marsden, art by Shaun Tan.
Shaun Tan's art is far, far more intelligent and perceptive than Marsden's text.
This is an sf-nal metaphorical story about the colonization of Australia. From the beginning, Tan's art does a wonderful job of, not just evoking, but depicting the differences between the native and indigenous perspectives on land, space, its usage: is the first panel (new to this edition) the ocean the rabbits are sailing across, or the land to which they are impending by night? A timeless scape of a wetland becomes, in the next page, a tiny watering hole against a vast desert landscape. In the next page, the water birds that stalked the wetlands are dots against the vastness of the blue sky, itself bifurcated by the crimson rocks.
When the rabbits come, they begin imposing their mathematics and their divisions and their science on the landscape almost immediately. Very quickly, it becomes hard to find the native creatures at all, in their own land. The native creatures fight back; the rabbits win. The rabbits steal the children. Might makes right, a building in the rabbits' new inhuman city proclaims. Tan brilliantly and deftly depicts the strategies of Empire, its information retrieval and its abstractions, the workings of the archive state, the all-seeing eye and the omnidirectionality of control. Who will save us from the rabbits? the final page asks, a rabbit and a native creature sitting across from each other at a dead watering hole under an ashen sky. The land is devastated. The stars have no answer.
( Cut for long discussion of racism, colonialism, attendant fail )I do know, however, that what shape "reconciliation" and "the future" may take cannot be determined one-sidedly, not and have any validity.
This was probably not the book to pick up to read when I was exhausted; any infelicities in the following are, even more than usual, entirely my fault, and as always, I welcome corrections and comments.
The Rabbits (1998). Words by John Marsden, art by Shaun Tan.
Shaun Tan's art is far, far more intelligent and perceptive than Marsden's text.
This is an sf-nal metaphorical story about the colonization of Australia. From the beginning, Tan's art does a wonderful job of, not just evoking, but depicting the differences between the native and indigenous perspectives on land, space, its usage: is the first panel (new to this edition) the ocean the rabbits are sailing across, or the land to which they are impending by night? A timeless scape of a wetland becomes, in the next page, a tiny watering hole against a vast desert landscape. In the next page, the water birds that stalked the wetlands are dots against the vastness of the blue sky, itself bifurcated by the crimson rocks.
When the rabbits come, they begin imposing their mathematics and their divisions and their science on the landscape almost immediately. Very quickly, it becomes hard to find the native creatures at all, in their own land. The native creatures fight back; the rabbits win. The rabbits steal the children. Might makes right, a building in the rabbits' new inhuman city proclaims. Tan brilliantly and deftly depicts the strategies of Empire, its information retrieval and its abstractions, the workings of the archive state, the all-seeing eye and the omnidirectionality of control. Who will save us from the rabbits? the final page asks, a rabbit and a native creature sitting across from each other at a dead watering hole under an ashen sky. The land is devastated. The stars have no answer.
( Cut for long discussion of racism, colonialism, attendant fail )I do know, however, that what shape "reconciliation" and "the future" may take cannot be determined one-sidedly, not and have any validity.
